Cast of Shadows - v4 (46 page)

Justin dove forward on his belly and slid on some sort of greasy sludge, which propelled him beneath the carriage of the truck in front of him. The shovel came down, just missing his foot.

“Bastard!” Coyne shouted.

All right,
Justin thought.
Now it really is personal. Mother. Fucker.

On his belly he slithered away from Coyne, using the trucks as cover. Coyne hadn’t followed him. Justin could see his feet circling around the perimeter of the trucks, trying to cut him off. Justin backed up and changed direction. Sensing his motion, Coyne retraced his steps.
Dammit.
He had to find a way back to Sally.

“Little <
AGE INAPPROPRIATE
>, where are you?” Coyne shouted. He was practically jovial about it. Laughing between taunts. Sally and Justin hadn’t foiled his plans, they’d just made the game more challenging for him. More fun. Justin wondered if the extra energy Coyne spent killing him and Sally might actually save a real girl’s life. He hoped he wasn’t doing this for nothing.

Then he understood what Sally had been warning him about.
Under the trucks.

Three vehicles to his right he saw the blade of the knife wink at him in the reflected light. Beautiful. That was his way out of here.

“Why don’t you come under here and get me?” Justin answered as he made his way toward the weapon.

Coyne snickered. “Maybe. Or maybe I’ll just back you up into the lot until there’s no place for you to go, and then double back to your girlfriend there.”

Justin took the knife in his right hand and crawled until he was inches away from the aisle where Coyne was standing. Justin waited a second, then bent his right knee, kicking a gas tank with his boot. To Coyne, the noise was loud and close. He ran toward it.

“Gotcha!” He bent down and swung the shovel under the truck. Justin stopped it with his left hand, the blade making a gash in his palm, and pulled the shovel toward him. Coyne refused to let go, fighting with Justin for control of the tool. In an effort to break it free, Coyne pushed the shovel further under the truck, exposing his hands at the end of the handle. Justin saw and struck.

“<
AGE INAPPROPRIATE
>!” Coyne yelled. When Justin slashed unexpectedly into Coyne’s arm, the game created an involuntary response to the pain, causing Coyne to drop the shovel and recoil. Justin pushed himself out from under the truck and went after Coyne again. Sitting on the ground, the older man could do little but try to defend himself. He rolled onto his back and started kicking at Justin’s hands. Justin swatted the man’s shoes away and made a few crazed stabs at his legs.

Barwick called out, “Justin, what’s happening?” Her voice stopped Justin in the middle of his assault. The most important thing was to protect her. She was the one putting her online life at risk. Cocky again, Justin grabbed the shovel and retreated between the trucks, back toward her voice. “Fuck you, Coyne!” Justin called out over his shoulder, for no reason but to make the lunatic aware they knew his name. “Go to hell!”

On the blue tarp, blood beginning to ooze from underneath it, Barwick looked up with a start when she heard Justin approach. He knelt beside her and took her hands in his, and she turned his left one over and started at the open wound.

“We need to get to a hospital,” she said.

Justin shook his wrist. “Naw, I’m fine. It’s just a game.”

“I mean for me,” she said. She pointed to the shovel in his hands. “While you were blinded, he smacked me with that thing.” Sally lifted her hair and on her finely rendered temple Justin could see a large bruise growing toward her eye.

“All right,” he said. “We should get out of here
now.
I lost sight of him, but he could try to cut us off.” He held out the knife. “Can you hold this? Or wave it around, anyway? Look menacing?” She wanted to stab Justin with it, to tell the truth. Justin had saved her with that blind tackle, but it was his insane scheming that had put her in danger in the first place. What the hell had she been thinking? And they weren’t out of it yet. She tapped her bruise with the handle of the knife and the pain meter shot to life. She might have a concussion.

Practically hanging from his shoulder with one hand and making a conspicuous presentation with the blade in the other, Sally and Justin walked out of the garage the way they’d come in. Neither mentioned to the other how relieved and disturbed they were that Coyne didn’t show himself again.

Joan felt Davis come to bed late, after midnight, and he settled inertly and heavily into the left side, his side, as if eased there by a dockside crane. She recognized the sigh, the murmur, the groan, and knew he wasn’t coming to sleep, but only to seek refuge from being tired, from the thing that was causing him stress and unhappiness. Oddly, even though the place he chose to hide was only inches away — was, in fact, the very spot on which they had made love countless times before and since their wedding day — she was convinced the thing he no longer wanted to face was their marriage.

She stretched an arm across his thickening belly nevertheless. “What is it?” she said.

“I’ve been keeping something from you.”

Oh God.

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know what you’d say. How you’d react. I know you thought I was past it.”

Wherever he was heading, this sounded bad. Bad for her. Bad for
them.

“I know who did it,” he said. “I know who killed her.”

Awake now. Wide awake. “What are you talking about?”

“Sam Coyne. That’s his name. He killed AK. He was a boy in her class.”

In the dark, with the dense red curtains blocking the streetlamps and the moonlight, she could barely see his face, but his white hair reflected what little fluorescence there was in the room. He was staring at the ceiling and she wondered if he planned this, planned to tell her all along, if he knew she’d be awake tonight and planned to tell her, or if he was just tired, tired of not sleeping, tired of not telling. It didn’t matter much either way, now that she knew what had been bothering him.

“Do you know where he is now?”

“Chicago. He’s an attorney. Ginsburg and Addams.”

“No,” she said. “Shit.”

“No shit.”

“Honey, are you sure? How do you know?”

He inhaled a long breath, as if he had to tell the entire story before it expired. “Justin came to me.” He held up a preemptive hand. “I never called him. Hadn’t even laid eyes on him in years, but he came to me a few months ago. In the fall.” It came out then, not in one breath but in pieces and tangents and in forgotten bits where the tale had to be stopped and backstory recounted.

When it was done, he said, “I don’t know what to do, Joan.”

She pulled herself closer to him. “Can you call the police?”

“If the point is to land
me
in jail for fraud and genetic tampering, sure.”

“Well,” Joan said with a hopeful sigh. “This isn’t going to sound like much of an idea, but you could do nothing. You could let it go. A lot of lives have been disrupted or even ended because you started on this path. And I take responsibility for that, too. But if you really can’t get this guy without hurting anyone else — and by anyone else I mean you and me, of course, but also Justin and Martha Finn — then maybe it’s just time to walk away.”

Davis said, “That’s probably an excellent idea, Dr. Burton. But it might be out of my hands.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the boy. He’s fixated on Coyne. I think he plans to do something. Something irrational.”

Joan was up on an elbow. “Do you think he’d kill him?”

“I don’t know. He’s convinced Coyne is the Wicker Man, and he’s trying to prove it.”

“God. I mean, do you think it’s possible? That Coyne is a serial killer?”

Davis frowned. “No. I mean, is he capable? Sure. He’s proven that. But Justin was obsessed with the Wicker Man before he even found out he was a clone. Before he found out he was cloned from Sam Coyne. In his head, he’s obviously put these things together on the flimsiest of evidence. You know, he plays that video game—”

“Shadow World.”

“Right. And like a lot of other gamers, he talks about the things that happen in Shadow World as if they actually happened, but then he’ll disclaim it and say something like,
You know, it’s only a game…
”

“But you think he has a hard time distinguishing the game from reality?”

“No, I think he has a hard time distinguishing reality from the game. I think he looks at
real life
as if it’s some sort of contest. As if life is a puzzle to be figured out. That there’s an objective. Winners and losers. A purpose. And now he’s convinced his purpose for being here is to bring down Sam Coyne for murdering AK.”

Joan whispered, “How do you know he’s wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe there
is
something each of us is here for, and maybe our lives
are
supposed to be spent figuring out what that is. I mean really, Davis, Justin actually
was
created for a purpose.
A very specific purpose.
And you know what? That purpose was exactly what he thinks it is.”

Davis propped himself up on one arm. “Justin wasn’t created so that
he
could find AK’s killer. I wasn’t thinking clearly, and I shouldn’t have done it. The question is, what do I do now? What do I do with the knowledge that the monster that took my daughter from me is living it up as a partner at a prestigious law firm? How can I let that be? And what do I do about Justin? He’s my responsibility.”

Her hands wet with her husband’s sweat, Joan went to the closet for a towel, and she brought him a clean T-shirt, peeling the dirty one from his shoulders and drying him off the way a nurse would.

“We’ll figure it out,” she said. “Just promise me when this is over, whatever happens, we’ll stop keeping secrets and I’ll have you all to myself.”

Cooled as she lifted the dampness from his chest and arms, Davis smiled in the dark. “You’d be the first,” he said. “But I promise.”

When a fantasy gamer gets sick or injured, she usually lets the avatar die. A Shadow World hospital is about as much fun as a real one, and nobody wants to sit through stitches and a physical when she can start the game over instead. There are only two kinds of people with enough at stake to bring their characters to Shadow hospitals: players who’ve achieved great success, fame, or wealth inside the game, and True-to-Lifers. Fortunately, that means the emergency room wait is only half as long.

In front of the computer in his room, Justin worried his mother would hear him talking into his headset. It was getting closer to dawn and his mother — his real mother — would be sleeping less soundly. She had patience with his gaming, but she’d flip if she knew he’d been staying up all night, driving around town with a thirty-five-year-old woman, and getting in knife fights with serial killers. He started typing words for his avatar instead of speaking them.

Shadow Sally sat on an exam table, needlessly dressed down to green scrubs. A doctor, Hannah Wright, conducted a series of unconvincing tests (Justin guessed she was a fantasy player pretending to be a doctor) before telling her she was going to be okay.

“Sally, you have a concussion,” Dr. Wright said. “I’ve ruled out a serious head injury and your spinal cord seems fine. Take acetaminophen when the pain gets to you. Stay away from aspirin or ibuprofen, all right?”

“Dr. Wright, sure.”

The avatar named Dr. Wright took a seat in an orange plastic chair; her eye line was at least eighteen inches below Barwick’s, and she looked up at her with her head tilted to the right. “Sally, do you have someone to stay up with you tonight? Just in case you start showing disorientation? How about your friend here?”

Shadow Justin took a step away from the wall. “Well, yeah. Sure. I mean, I have to go to school in a couple hours,” he said. “But my avatar could stay with her. And I could check in on her every few hours.”

God, he still doesn’t get it,
Sally thought.
What it means to be a TTL.

“Good,” Dr. Wright said. “I’m sure she’ll be fine. I’d like the two of you to sit here for another half hour, just to make sure there isn’t any unexpected swelling or disorientation.”

“Thanks, Doctor,” Sally said. Dr. Wright left the exam room to see other patients.

At home, Justin — real Justin — was tired. The fight with Coyne had been intense and he wanted to shut down his computer and get an hour of sleep before school. But he knew if he left his avatar alone with Sally’s, it wouldn’t be able to monitor her “orientation.”

“You don’t have to stay,” Barwick said.

“No, I want to,” he typed. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” she said. “Avatars heal quickly.”

“Yeah, but did they factor in all the symptoms right? On a percentage basis? You could just drop dead from an aneurysm or whatever.”

“Thanks.”

The energy meter on Justin’s screen dipped to a critically low level, and he grabbed the orange chair. Even if he wasn’t going to sleep tonight, his avatar could use a little rest.

Shadow Sally sat on the exam table, her fingers tucked under her thighs. Her bruise was already healing, an indication from the game, Justin suspected, that her injuries weren’t going to be so bad.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said.

“Of course.”

“Why is this life so important to you? I mean, I play the game. It’s fun. Why did you need to come here to the hospital? If your online life is exactly the same as your real one, why can’t you just start over if something happens to you? It seems like you wouldn’t even lose a day.”

Sally said, “The best way I can explain it — it’s sort of a Zen thing. The goal of being a True-to-Lifer is to make the two existences, online and off-line, equally important. Equally real. Some TTLs treat their avatar like a yin to their yang, trying to channel their less attractive impulses into a fictional character so they can be a better person in real life. Others, like me, are trying to lead two nearly identical lives. If I were to die in Shadow World, I would feel the pain as if a real person had been lost. And if I were to die in real life, my avatar would hopefully go on without me.”